All hot streaks inevitably fade with time, or, catching COVID for the first time in 2024.

It happened. It's fine. Just obnoxious.

I’m tired.

There’s a certain malaise that’s laced with ennui defining this experience of being sick this last week and change. That unenviable brain fog that I got to hear so much of, and now it festers inside of me, providing a sense of weightlessness and distance from the world. The very idea of sitting around and doing nothing plagues me, perhaps more than something people jokingly call “the plague” does. In and out of these low-grade fevers, I’m swatting away whatever this transient jet lag is.

That phrase, “transient jet lag” has stuck with me for the better part of twenty years now, a holdover of an entirely too clever moniker for a Mars Volta fan blog. Just like “lost in the chaparral” was such a clever turn of phrase for a Tumblr blog satirizing Cormac McCarthy. Sometimes it’s important to remember where parts of you originated, even if the world has forgotten.

Today, a hold on a story I was so certain about selling returned to me by way of an impersonal form rejection, one that has been on hold long enough that Owen could horrifically break his arm and completely heal before this unceremonious dismissal. Everyone who tells you that publishing is a waiting game tells you from a place of doing it part time. Because, at least to them, it’s the dream on the side. When you do things out of order, as I do, your brain scattered throughout this uncertain time and place, you’ve already been a professional writer for many years, and trying to make “traditional publishing” work is finding a lot of those damnable institutions raged against in college didn’t go anywhere, it was just me who eschewed them. That one hurt, though. Although this distance de-fanged it enough for the bite to merely sting.

That is what it is to be trapped between worlds, although I always have been, I fear.

Day six, after purportedly fending off COVID for four years (until now), and things remain just out-of-reach. Life moves on, and all I wish to do is follow suit. Just like with publishing, I’ll persevere because I can’t fathom a world where I’m anything else but an asshole assembling words into signs, symbols and metaphors from the dirt, this’ll pass and the fog will life, but things being easy occasionally would be a nice change of pace.

In closing, I’ll pose a question that has no righteous answer. How did a pair of studio monitors come with only RCA to 3.5mm cable, eschewing a standard set of ¼” speaker cables? What’s the point of a set of balanced monitors if in the box they only include an unbalanced input?

Brought to you by Coke Zero Sugar.

I get to listen to this on a new set of speakers after using the same, tinny little bastards since 2007. There’s always some joy to be found.